Category: YESTERDAYS

salt for such wounds

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It is unlikely that anything will sting the way once, when you were so much younger, your friend sat down with you to confess that his feelings had shifted and what he had thought was a bit of fun while verbally sparring was actually an attraction and he had to acknowledge it, it wasn't worth pretending he didn't feel what he felt. He'd maybe never felt this way, so absolutely physically attracted to someone he felt intellectually matched with, and emotionally too. He needed to tell you about his feelings. And you in the blush of that moment realizing that you too had feelings, that the only reason you hadn't acknowledged them to anyone including yourself was that it seemed so certain they'd be not just unrequited but ridiculous, like falling in love with the moon. But what if the moon said he loved you, what if the moon said it first? Your heart rushing to the surface of your face. "Everyone will be so surprised," you said. "Even I'm surprised!" And he said, "So… She hasn't told you?" And you realized that ahhhhhhh this another story where the only part that is about you is how well you listen; what a good listener you are. You spent the rest of the night drinking and laughing about his newfound love.

That wasn't the first and not the last time that you have realized in the middle of a story that it wasn't about you. Nobody else's story is about you; everyone is the hero of his own story. Everyone is their own main character, this makes perfect sense. And sometimes you're not a character in their story at all. No reason for it to sting, though it almost always does, the sting of salt in the eyes and you blink it away.

And now you are more than halfway through life, the sunset years, rich with purple and gold and you want for nothing, happy to be a tertiary character in every story other than your own, swelling a progress or starting a scene or two, so to speak. It's fine. But the other day when you found yourself written entirely out of a scene while someone looked you full in the face in a chapter you'd built and told you how much other people had done as though you weren't even part of it, and the salt rose in your eyes and you felt every relegation fresh, and followed it with a shot of self loathing for ever having thought, for ever having even imagined that anyone would give you top billing or any billing at all. Of course of course of course. It's never going to stop. Keep your eyes firmly on your own work. Blink it away. 

 

 

 

back in the day

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I was in my early 20s. At the time I felt like a fully grown adult. I'd finished college, had a couple heartbreaks, lived abroad, worked in real jobs, traveled. At 24, I'd moved back to the US and started working at a sales job. My boss was creepy. During training he had us turn off our tape recorders (tape recorders!) so that he could tell us that if we ever said anything negative about him, we would be fired because he was "in" with the bosses and we weren't. I'd like to say that's why I didn't complain but actually I only connected those dots later, how it felt to know what you might say would be meaningless. Anyway he was creepy. When I'd go into his office he'd close the blinds and ask me to pull up my skirt an inch, another inch. I was young and used to a certain amount of attention from men, which I mostly ignored because it mostly felt like being ogled in a zoo (and this "just ignore it" thing was of course heightened by having lived in Japan, which was very much like living in a zoo all the time, photographed randomly as if I were an exotic animal of some sort). Anyway so he'd be creepy and I'd ignore it. I thought it was about me. We know now that it almost never ever is but that was then. At night when I'd call in my sales reports he'd ask what I was wearing, to describe it; he'd ask me to touch myself. And I would just change the subject but I didn't tell him to stop. I remember when Anita Hill testified I had absolutely no doubt that she was telling the truth, though I also thought she seemed to be awfully upset when what she was saying just wasn't that bad, comparatively. I feel bad about that now, because my boss wasn't up for the supreme court, and any creepy from your boss is too creepy. It shouldn't be that way. Going to work shouldn't feel like hell because of the people you're working with. That you don't even get to think about the work itself because everything is poisoned. Anyway back to me, 24-year-old me, so my boss was creepy and I thought it was about me and then another salesperson, a woman, asked if he was ever inappropriate and we talked about him and that's when I learned it wasn't about me. And then when I went to train with another salesperson in a different town, she told me that one of the reasons she'd transferred there was to not work with him. And then other women told me when I hinted at the subject. And still none of us said anything. I didn't say anything. After about a year I got promoted and moved to a different region and I didn't have to talk to him anymore. At some point a woman from a completely different region came to visit and I was telling her what it had been like to work with him, and that I thought sooner or later someone would complain. And she did, she took it to the head of the company. And he called and asked and I said no it wasn't so bad it didn't bother me. I think I thought that the worst thing was to confess that I was bothered, that I would be weak if I said it wasn't okay, so I said it was fine. And so did all the other women they called to ask, the women who had told me the truth were lying, we were all lying. I can't convey to you what the fear of looking like I couldn't handle something was like. When I remember this I don't also remember that I was 24, that I was different and times were different. A few days later I called the head of the company again and said that my boss had asked me to bring him clippings of my pubic hair in an envelope, to prove that I didn't dye my hair. Carpets gotta match the drapes, he had said. In what world did I think that was tolerable? In that world, apparently. It's hilarious that 30 years later I still feel dirty, still feel guilty. That it happened. That I didn't see that it was wrong. That I thought I'd ruin everything by saying how awful things were. That I thought I was weak, and that I was. 

RE/search

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One thing that I remember is that I felt so odd and like I didn't belong, and I met people who also didn't belong but then amongst them there was also belonging and not, an inner and outer circle. Eventually, I didn't care, I understood loneliness as a natural state.

When these books came to us (how?), it was everything. It was an encyclopedia guide to a world of which I inhabited a corner. And then I was not alone.

There is always the struggle to reconcile the attachment to being unique with the desire to find a tribe. These books were the tribes.

Yesterday, we were in Vesuvio and I thought I was going to tell the story of how people take me for granted, how I have granted myself for people to take. I wanted to be anywhere but the room I was in, suddenly ready to cry, and the books appeared on the sidewalk and I was 18 again, running to books, and this time the publisher was there and all I could do is say you changed my life, you saved my life, and we took pictures and my whole day turned around. Books will always save you if you let them.

fallacies of morning rose

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Today would have been your birthday. I don't want to say I think about you every day because that would be a lie. I didn't think about you every day when you were alive, though probably every week at least, because that's when we talked, when we were talking. I think about you in passing probably once or twice a month, and intensely (and with longing for the good parts of you, which I miss) maybe every other month now. Ten years. 

I remember a lot. I remember good things. I realize that, as is my way, I shut a lot of sad things in a room that I try not to visit but I do try to remember that they're there. Not to make anybody better than they really were. Sometimes you were cruel, sometimes you came very close to hurting me. I usually didn't let you close enough to risk that, and there was a reason I held back, and I try to remember that. When you died I wasn't sure whether I had the right to mourn you, because we were never tangled and messy and I didn't know whether twenty years of visits and letters and phone calls was enough. I tried to talk myself out of my tears.

I've been thinking lately about pain and about how if we numb ourselves to it or remove it from our lives we feel considerably stronger, but it leaves us incredibly vulnerable to any pain that gets past those barriers. I think about the pain you were in, and your glorious anger, and how much I learned about pushing through pain from you. Only to watch you become someone who numbed yourself into a stupor from which you only sometimes emerged. You were hardly ever angry anymore, which was good in some ways, though it made you sloppy in other ways. You were much less alive. And then you were dead.

I mourn you at your most alive, man who made me laugh so hard it hurt. I mourn who you were when you became a person who couldn't keep up with me half the time, your once-quicksilver wit flashing out to remind me of what it was like to be in the presence of someone that sharp, then fading back into tarnish. I mourn who you might be now, the person I'll never know, who would have been one of the few who knew me then. What would you think of that? What would you think of this?

Ten years. I'll always love you. I'll always be angry that you're gone. 

lonely is as lonely does

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When I lived in Kokura I had Sundays and Mondays off work. I would finish teaching on Saturday and make three stops on my way home: the grocery store, the bakery, the video store. At the grocery store — coffee, miso, noodles, a vegetable if I could identify it, eggs. At the bakery — I still miss the pastries they had, light flaky dough, heavy with rich cream on the insides. At the video store, five movies, maybe more. Then I would go up to my apartment on the 10th floor and not leave again until Tuesday. I listened to mix tapes my ex-boyfriend sent in what I now realize was less a gesture of continuing friendship and more an attempt to get me back; he was playing to his strengths, he made the best mixes. I wrote letters, long honest poetic letters (playing to my own strengths) — the kind I would have liked to receive. I cleaned from one side of the apartment to the other, the tatami pressing into my knees as I wiped it down. Sheets outside drying crisp in the gray air. I sat under the heated kotatsu table, blanket pulled up under my arms, and watched movies with a gluttony matched only by how I tore through those pastries, powdered sugar fingers. Sometimes I filled the bath, which took an hour, scrubbed myself head to foot and then gingerly lowered myself into the scalding water. I was so attuned to myself then. In my memories, I was sometimes happy and sometimes I was very very sad. I don't think I was lonely, though, not exactly. Gradually I met people, let them in, and because my home was a place where I was so content it became a place where other people were also content, and I liked that. Generally I don't like people, don't like animals, don't like most things beyond my understanding, being primarily an indoor person with books and music and television, which I understand. I've been thinking about this with the current epidemic. This is not particularly hard for me. Even at my most social, at least half of my relationships are long distance. I realize I live with someone now, so it's different. But I'm thinking about friendship. I do love some people, in a physically present and tactile way, and having spent 30 years learning how to do that, it is weird to not be able to. Not hard, not yet, but weird. 

salt for such wounds

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When I was a little girl, salting the feathers of birds so that I could catch them. Photographs my father took: my woolen coat, salt shaker, chubby legs hopeless in pursuit. I never wondered what I would do if I caught the birds, but then I never did.

What do you even get out of that relationship? I asked him. I feel loved, he said. Me, scoffing: Right, I'm pretty sure that's the bare minimum for a relationship. Really? he asks. And have you felt loved, in your relationships?

On the phone I say I miss you. Come be with me, I say. The connection is weak, the sound drops out, my voice echoes back to me. The trick is that if you were close enough to salt it, you'd be close enough to catch it. I throw the salt as far as I can; the wind sweeps it back into my eyes and it stings like tears.

fell to earth

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One thing I remember is that we were riding around in your car. Was I in the front seat? I think I was, which would mean it was just the two of us, because if there was anybody else I was in the back seat. I think this is true, that I was consistently relegated, though that seems cruel and deliberate which you really weren't, so maybe I was in the front seat and somebody else was in back. Anyway maybe we were alone, maybe we weren't,  maybe I was in the back seat. This is when I felt myself somehow at the lower outer edges of your circle, but increasingly in my own independent circle almost everywhere else. I felt like belonging in your group excused me from trying to belong anywhere else. It was remarkably freeing when I was anywhere except with you. Gosh I loved you, or loved isn't quite right. Admired? Aspired. Loved though, too, in retrospect, knowing what I know now of myself and of you and of love. Anyway we were in your car. At the time we all shaved our eyebrows, I thought it was… a thing we did. Like piercing our ears multiple times, shaving parts of our hair was just like, an extension or an exaggeration of what other people did. Everybody had their ears pierced once and we had once and more; everybody shaved their legs and we shaved our legs and eyebrows. Etc. I thought it was just a thing. And then in the car you turned to me… at a stoplight, I guess. I had the full force of your attention for a moment. You turned to me — sideways if I was in the front seat, or looking over your shoulder if I was in the backseat, diagonal from you. Does it matter if there was anyone else? It's mostly that the shame I remember makes me think there were witnesses. You looked at me fully and said  my name, the name I used then, and said "stop shaving your eyebrows, you look ridiculous." It is interesting to me how in so many of my memories, when I remember them I fully inhabit them. I can inhabit this memory too: the hot flush that starts at my collarbone and creeps up my neck, cheeks red, all the piercings in my ears burning. Eyes stinging with tears. The full realization that the group I thought I was in… I wasn't in, after all. The feeling of loss when you lose a balloon, when your beloved suddenly lifts from your hand and escapes your grasp forever. At the same time, I associate this memory with a feeling of freedom: I am also the balloon; I am set free. And interestingly now, increasingly, I see this memory through your eyes. I would be kinder, I like to think I would be kinder; I'm also a lifetime older than you were then. But in that moment you turned to me, this person who would have died for you, and shoved me away: be yourself; live for yourself. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how to tell someone that their hunger, their visible ravenous hunger, is the thing that keeps them from being fed. That their need to belong is what holds them back from belonging. I know that I have tried to love people I didn't love because there was a girl in a car seat with bald eyebrows who just wanted to be loved. In a way, looking back, knowing what I know, what you did was love. And looking back, in a way I'm grateful. Although you also looked ridiculous, to be honest. And knowing what I know now, also wanted very much to be loved.

carrying stones across a stony field

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When I was little I had a best friend. I don't mean my best imaginary friend, but a best real friend. She lived across the street. We walked to school together. We rode our bikes after school. We had birthday parties together, played together, read books together. As twilight came on I would ask to walk her home, then when we got to her door she'd walk me back home, back and forth until somebody's parents caught on, and then she'd run back across the two front yards alone, her hair caught the moonlight; she was magic. She was wildly different from me in many ways that were probably important — she was sporty, tireless, not given to long periods of day-dreaming — and we were brought up with radically different values and perspectives. I remember particularly playing badminton in her yard and every time I missed the birdie, which was often, I would go to retrieve it while she or her sister listed out everything that was wrong with me. But I loved her so fiercely and so completely and on days when she loved me back my world was perfect. Some days she played with other kids and I would fling my whole tiny jealous body across my bed and weep. How could she? Why? Why couldn't she just love me back as intensely as I loved her, why couldn't we be best forever and only friends? I read so many books about best friends and I guess I thought I could will it into being, that I could will her into loving me like Diana Barry loved her red-headed Anne.

When I was 13 we moved across the country and since unlike me she was not much of a writer we fell out of contact. I went back to visit the house where I grew up and the yards weren't nearly as big as I'd thought, her sacrifice in walking home alone might have lasted two minutes. There were not a lot of kids in the neighborhood, but there was a neighborhood and there were kids; I played with Kelly sometimes and with Sara, or with other girls from school, but it wasn't the same. Why was I so fixated on this one person, accepting no alternatives; why did I want one friend, one special friend, a best friend so much and why was I determined it should be her?

I've been thinking about this lately, that after the bottom of that basket fell out, I never again put all my eggs in one place. Not that I haven't had friends — I absolutely have, intensely close friends, people I would honestly kill or die for. And having friends has gotten easier as I've gotten older, much in the same way that letting myself recognize and say "I love you" got easier when I realized that loving one person will not rob me of the ability to love another — in fact, rather the opposite.

But sometimes I think there is a small Anne inside of me that still wishes for one person. We would know each other so well, where we were and how we got here, someone who would know me and still be interested in me. Someone who would be genuinely curious about hearing my dreams, someone who would be eager to tell me theirs. Someone who could not get enough of me, the way I can never get enough. And people do like to listen to me, and people like to tell me things, and I'm happy to sit and converse about just about anything as long as you don't want me to play badminton while I do it. The things I once did for love, the things I did to be loved. But I don't think it's possible now to put it all on one person, if it ever was. Poor small Anne, it was hard enough when you were eight and nobody could sit still now for your fifty years of metaphors and details, the intensity of the obsessions, much less the tiny day-to-day stuff, even if you could sit still long enough to tell them. I'm happy where I am now, happier than the little freckled girl soaking her pillows with hot tears could have ever imagined. I wish I could pat her back and tell her it's going to be okay, better than okay, just different, some day.

chafe. waif. strafe.

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When I was in fourth grade, I think it was fourth grade or maybe third, I wrote a poem about candy for a poetry contest in my school. My small town's poet laureate, possibly self-appointed, came to the school with much ceremony and we all recited her poem about the foundation of our town ("the first raw sight to meet their eyes was the head on the bloody spear"). She announced the winner of the poetry contest and I guess presented me with some kind of prize and I felt very proud. Afterwards the girl who hated me so much she spit on me told me that I had only gotten that prize because my mother worked at the school, which was probably not true but felt pretty bad. I had rhymed dandy and handy with candy and everything tasted like dust after that.

In junior high I wrote a poem about a father who had died as a soldier, the sad child narrator trying to comfort the grieving widow mother. "Love is like a passing song" I wrote and my teacher called my parents in with concern for my well-being, at least this is what I remember. I had rhymed song and along and strong and boy was I ever wrong, about what really hurt and what pain I was ready to experience.

In college I wrote a poem about my friend's grandfather, who was entirely insane and would sprinkle visitors with the ashes of his dead wife, which he said was fairy dust. At that time I was giving poetry readings for actual money from time to time and I thought very highly of myself for that. I wasn't even rhyming stuff because I was a Real Poet. A local magazine offered to publish the poem and changed some of the words around and I felt like someone had pierced my baby's ears without asking. Anyway that was the end of trying to get anybody to publish anything I wrote for a really long time. 

Last year I wrote a short piece for a small website and was again edited without consultation which is really not a nice thing to do to an editor. I was about to persuade myself that in terms of my own writing I really I need to stop dealing with other people all the time forever. But this year there's a short story contest and they want people to write about Brno and since I can barely stop talking about Brno it stands to reason that I find this irresistible. At this point it's not even about winning, it's just about not walking away feeling violated. There's no poetry in it this time so I hope I'll be safe. Maybe I'm a little naïf.